Climate change is a reality, and communities around the world are now facing significant environmental problems – rising global temperatures leading to increased risk of flooding, fire, and sea level rise, resulting in the destruction of property and social infrastructure, loss of biodiversity and tangible and intangible cultural heritage, and damage to economies. Little wonder then that the online conference held on 30 September 2021 with the title “Ecomuseums and Climate Action” attracted more than one hundred participants from countries whose communities are facing these problems.This book presents the results of this conference where heritage experts, community activists, curators, politicians and academics from several countries, explored how ecomuseums and community museums are acting as catalysts for transition, renewal, and sustainable development and how they might effectively contribute to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and climate action. How can these organisations best contribute to the debate about the climate crisis and promote local action? Central to those actions are encouraging local people to recognise how important their cultural, natural and intangible cultural heritage is in making places special and giving a sense of belonging, why that heritage should be sustained, and how heritage assets can be used to promote climate action. This book – with its remarkable collection of essays from around the world – demonstrates how small local actions, considered together, can have a dramatic and far-reaching impact. It will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in climate action, heritage and museum studies, and environmental issues.

Climate change is a reality, and communities around the world are now facing significant environmental problems - rising global temperatures leading to increased risk of flooding, fire, and sea level rise, resulting in the destruction of property and social infrastructure, loss of biodiversity and tangible and intangible cultural heritage, and damage to economies. Little wonder then that the online conference held on 30 September 2021 with the title "Ecomuseums and Climate Action" attracted more than one hundred participants from countries whose communities are facing these problems. This book presents the results of this conference where heritage experts, community activists, curators, politicians and academics from several countries, explored how ecomuseums and community museums are acting as catalysts for transition, renewal, and sustainable development and how they might effectively contribute to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and climate action. How can these organisations best contribute to the debate about the climate crisis and promote local action? Central to those actions are encouraging local people to recognise how important their cultural, natural and intangible cultural heritage is in making places special and giving a sense of belonging, why that heritage should be sustained, and how heritage assets can be used to promote climate action. This book - with its remarkable collection of essays from around the world - demonstrates how small local actions, considered together, can have a dramatic and far-reaching impact. It will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in climate action, heritage and museum studies, and environmental issues.

Museums and the Climate Crisis shows how museums can respond to the interrelated global climate, biodiversity and pollution crises. They have a unique role because they take a long-term perspective, and their scholarship and independence mean that they remain trusted by the public. Providing insights and international case studies from a range of museum and gallery professionals, academics and consultants, this book explores how museums can use this unique perspective to engage the public as active citizens, and how they are exemplars of good practice in areas such as emissions reduction and encouraging biodiversity. It shows how museums can combat climate exhaustion by drawing on understandings about positive motivation, and how to develop exhibitions, events and activities that motivate visitors to take action. Taking a broad approach beyond purely climate issues, the contributions touch on the use of renewables, environmental controls and standards, travel (including virtual couriering), waste management (including recycling, plastic reduction and composting), reducing pollution and increasing biodiversity within museums. Museums and the Climate Crisis will be important reading to those studying in the fields of Museum Studies, Heritage Studies and Conservation. Taking a practical approach, it will also be beneficial to museum, gallery and heritage professionals who are grappling with the challenges of the climate crisis.

Climate change is a complex and dynamic environmental, cultural and political phenomenon that is reshaping our relationship to nature. Climate change is a global force, with global impacts. Viable solutions on what to do must involve dialogues and decision-making with many agencies, stakeholder groups and communities crossing all sectors and scales. Current policy approaches are inadequate and finding a consensus on how to reduce levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere through international protocols has proven difficult. Gaps between science and society limit government and industry capacity to engage with communities to broker innovative solutions to climate change. Drawing on leading-edge research and creative programming initiatives, this collection details the important roles and agencies that cultural institutions (in particular, natural history and science museums and science centres) can play within these gaps as resources, catalysts and change agents in climate change debates and decision-making processes; as unique public and trans-national spaces where diverse stakeholders, government and communities can meet; where knowledge can be mediated, competing discourses and agendas tabled and debated; and where both individual and collective action might be activated.

Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change explores the way museums tackle the broad global issue of climate change. It explores the power of real objects and collections to stir hearts and minds, to engage communities affected by change. Museums work through exhibitions, events, and specific collection projects to reach different communities in different ways. The book emphasises the moral responsibilities of museums to address climate change, not just by communicating science but also by enabling people already affected by changes to find their own ways of living with global warming. There are museums of natural history, of art and of social history. The focus of this book is the museum communities, like those in the Pacific, who have to find new ways to express their culture in a new place. The book considers how collections in museums might help future generations stay in touch with their culture, even where they have left their place. It asks what should the people of the present be collecting for museums in a climate-changed future? The book is rich with practical museum experience and detailed projects, as well as critical and philosophical analyses about where a museum can intervene to speak to this great conundrum of our times. Curating the Future is essential reading for all those working in museums and grappling with how to talk about climate change. It also has academic applications in courses of museology and museum studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, digital humanities, design, anthropology, and environmental humanities.

This updated second edition reference work looks at recent developments in the field internationally and in terms of new theories and practices.

This book is not a typical academic edited volume. Nor does it subscribe to the usual dictates of an exhibition catalogue. It does not seek to provide a comprehensive overview of work on climate change and museums or claim to have discovered One Quick Trick to Solve the Climate Emergency. Instead, the book reflects the main characteristics of the Reimagining Museums for Climate Action project: it is collaborative, distributed, conversational, subversive, nomadic and, at times, playful. The arguments it puts forward emerge through dialogue and speculation just as much as they respond to and build on empirical research. In this sense, the book is perhaps best seen as a partial and in many ways still evolving artefact of the Reimagining Museums project. It can be read from cover-to-cover, or its varied contents can be traversed in a less rigid fashion. It is one “output” among many, and its main aim is to prompt further transdisciplinary alliances, rather than set out a particular position or manifesto. To this end, the book invites peripatetic readings and strange deviations. It is anchored by eight concepts that reflect the diversity and creativity of museums, but it is also motivated by a desire to (re)situate this field within a broader set of debates on the roots of social and environmental injustice, and the role of museums in these histories.